There is now a good opportunity to promote a multilingual symbol because of the partners in the MultilingualWeb Project: we can continue to discuss ... but it is not going to get much better, with the risk of losing this opportunity.
> Over-use of an icon is not necessarily a bad thing.
> the icon is partially already being used to indicate "language" or "locale."
It is a bad thing because the globe is over-used for purposes not related to multilingualism: it means "global" in general. For example, "network" with the meaning of connected globally.
> I do believe we can provide guidance across industries so that this icon is limited to this one
> application. Frankly, it's going to be far easier to standardize than to introduce a new icon.
I disagree: I doubt that one can convince vendors to change the globe representing, for example, "network" to something else (what are the new icons for network and other stuff?). Even worse with physical object such as the re-painting a truck.
I believe it is far easier to introduce a "clean" icon specifically for multilingualism and let the firms move at their pace.
> SHEI may be a Unicode glyph, but do we have data that shows most computers have the fonts to
> support the display of this glyph?
The computers that I used for the last ten years contain the SHEI glyph: the other people in the list also seem to have it. Probably because it is in the Greek block and it has been in Unicode for a long time (it is my copy of version 2.0). Indeed, it was one the reasons why I selected it. It is easy to propagate the SHEI glyph by vendors or by the users.
> work with the Unicode Consortium to introduce a new "globe" icon glyph in the next update?
This is a worse case scenario without benefit:
- The new glyph should *not* be similar to a globe, for the reasons above
- Start a graphic competition: see the discussion for the SHEI that is ready :-)
- Include it in Unicode: invent the name ... another competition
- Populate all the computers: at least some of the present computers have the SHEI glyph
- The graphic properties of the new glyph must be similar to the SHEI glyph
After all the efforts, the result will be with the same property of the SHEI character.
Regards
C.